Month: January 2023

jan 21/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
21 degrees
99% snow and ice-covered

A common refrain: if only the path hadn’t been so icy and snowy, this would have been a near-perfect run. Loved the temperature and the grayish-white sky. Loved feeling strong and capable. Loved being outside moving and not stuck in the house. The only problem was the path. Terrible. Uneven, hard, rutted, slippery. Wearing my yaktrax helped a little, but it was still difficult. About a mile in, my right thigh was sore — I think from the extra effort of picking it up off of the slippery path. Thought about turning around, but decided to keep going to the falls and back.

Was able to Good Morning! Mr. Morning! Also gave some directions to the falls — up the hill. Passed a lot of runners and walkers. Can’t remember in there were any bikers — oh, I saw someone biking ahead me on the road, both of us on our way to the river.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. the cry of a pileated woodpecker
  2. a fine mist — was it barely snowing?
  3. a quick glance at the oak savanna — the split rail fence is sagging in one spot. I couldn’t tell for sure but I think the top 2 railings might have split
  4. a person standing in the snow near the part of the Winchell Trail that climbs out of the gorge for a few seconds near Folwell before dropping down again
  5. a woman walking a dog near the falls in a long light gray puffer coat that almost reached her ankles
  6. voices below — I stopped to look and saw someone walking closer to the bottom of the frozen falls
  7. 2 people standing above the falls, holding a phone high in front of them, taking a selfie
  8. off to my side, a leaning tree covered in white on one side
  9. at the start of the run, hearing a nail gun off in the distance — probably roofers
  10. 2 different times I encountered a walker wearing an orange backpack — 2 different times, 2 different walkers, 2 different backpacks, both orange

Did I see those orange backpacks? I believe I did, but I’ve been seeing a lot of orange lately. It’s one of the only colors that I notice these days. Strange.

Forgot to look at the river. I bet it was still brown.

jan 20/RUN

4.35 miles
river road trail, north/south
27 degrees
99% ice and snow-covered path, slick

Very slick outside today. A lot of ice covered with an inch or two of snow. That part of it wasn’t fun, but the rest of it — the cold air, the open river, the gray sky — was wonderful. Greeted Dave the Daily Walker. Passed Daddy Long Legs. Noticed all of the rusty orange leaves still on the trees near the tunnel of trees. Heard goose honks under the lake street bridge. Later, also heard some runner coughing as he crossed the bridge then turned down to enter the river road. No! Every few seconds, a deep cough, full of gunk. I sped up to try and stay ahead of him and his germs. It worked. For a few minutes, I kept hearing the jagged coughs, then it stopped.

Anything else? The river was brownish-gray, the sky sunless.
No headphones for most of the run. During the last mile, I put in an old coming-back-from-injury playlist: I heard “Upside Down” and “Fantastic Voyage.”

FWA is on band tour in Spain and France right now. 29 years ago, Scott and I were on our European band tour. 29 years ago? Wow. Very excited for FWA.

Sitting at my desk, writing this, I’m also looking outside my window at the robins running around on the snow and rooting in the hydrangea bushes for twigs? seeds? Quietly, they scamper then fly low right in front of me. What are they looking for?

Encountered a beautiful poem on twitter this morning that I thought I had already posted on my log but hadn’t.

A Stranger/ Saeed Jones

I wonder if my dead mother still thinks of me.
I know I don’t know her new name. I don’t know  

her, not now. I don’t know if “her” is the word
burning in a stranger’s mind when he sees my dead  

mother walking down the street in her bright black dress.
I wonder if he inhales the cigarette smoke  

that will eventually kill him and thinks “I wish I knew
a woman who was both the light and every shadow  

the light pierces.” I wonder if a passing glance at my dead
mother is enough to make a poet out of anyone. I wonder  

if I’m the song she hums as she waits for the light to change
or if I’m just the traffic signal holding her up.

This poem was posted as part of a thread. I want to post the next one, which is by Todd Dillard (one of my favorite poetry people). I like his introduction of the poem in a tweet:

I have so many poems also grieving my dead mother by giving her a kind of life after life.

Mom Hires a Stunt Double/ Todd Dillard

Sick of all the impossible I ask of her
in these my griefiest poems,

Mom hires a stunt double: same white hair,
same laugh, same false teeth, same dead.

Now when I write “Mom curls like rinds in a bowl”
it’s her stunt double twisting herself into pithy canoes.

When I write “At night my mother sheds
the skin of my mother revealing more mother”

it’s her stunt double that unzips her body,
stands there all shiver and muscle and tendon,

waiting for the next line. “What’s in it for you?”
I ask, and Mom’s stunt double shrugs,

lighting one of those familiar Turkish Silvers
as behind her my mother mounts a Harley

and barrels into the margins. “You’re a good kid,”
the double says. But she doesn’t touch my hair.

This close to her, her eyes are all pupil,
all ink. Her smell: paper and snow.

When she exhales smoke spills from her lips
and unfolds into horses.

Oh, I love both of these poems!

jan 19/SWIM

1.6 miles
ywca pool
outside: snowing (2+ inches)
31 degrees

Hooray for another swim. Such a good feeling to be moving through the water. Maybe it was because it was still snowing, but the pool was almost empty. Excellent. Mostly, I swam continuous 200s, breathing 3/4/5/6 by 50s. Starting the second mile, I tried something new, partly as a way to stretch my legs/bend my knees without stopping: I added in an occasional 25 of breaststroke. It seemed to work well.

dancing shadows

About 1000 yards in, I noticed the pool floor was moving slightly. I think it was the faint shadows of the snowflakes falling* on the other side of the big windows that stretch across the one side of the building. It made everything feel magical and dreamy and strange.

*Actually, when I was swimming, I thought the shadows were from the trees. It wasn’t until I was writing this entry, right now, that I realized it was probably the falling snow making the dancing shadows. Very cool. I think if I had realized that it was the snow, the whole experience of swimming would have felt even stranger and dreamier.

In addition to the moving shadows, I saw one solid shadow line stretching the length of the pool — a shadow of the lane line. Where was that shadow coming from? The bright ceiling light or the light from the snowy sky?

Seeing these shadows and continuing to pay attention to them, shifted me into a different state of being, one that was dreamier and surreal, and where I rethought what was possible or impossible. I imagined the water as air that I was swimming through. When I reached the deep end and looked down at the pool floor below me, I imagined that I was flying high above the ground through empty space. How fun and distracting. I forgot how many flip turns I had done, how many laps I still wanted to do.

Some other things I noticed:

  1. the sloshing of the water (below)
  2. the loud voices of some women talking and joking (above)
  3. the water running guy, doing running drills in the shallow end, then pushing off and vigorously kicking in the deep end, then finishing with some freestyle
  4. everything seemed blue below
  5. everything orange above
  6. the water was not completely clear, but wasn’t that cloudy either
  7. no harsh chlorine feeling
  8. I swam in lane 2, no one ever swam in lane 3, running dude was in lane 5
  9. nothing floating in the water, only random bits of something on the pool floor
  10. little bubbles in front of me as I sliced through the water and a slight spray as I lifted my elbow up into the air

Remembered reading a description of swim practice and the pool early in the morning, thick with a chlorine haze, in Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Lessons. Thought it might be nice to collect a few pool descriptions. Also thought about composing some more swimming breathing poems, where syllables match my breaths: 3/4/5/6.

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allen Poe (b. Jan 19, 1809)

I randomly searched, “Edgar Allen Poe swimming” and discovered that he was a swimmer! I had no idea. I found a promising article, “Edgar Allen Poe — Exercise Enthusiast,” but it was beyond a paywall so I couldn’t read it. Then I found this bit of information on a listicle about him:

Poe was a big fan of the long walk. He took many solitary strolls over High Bridge in the Bronx in 1847, after his wife Virginia died. There, staring up at the stars, he would conceive his lengthy cosmic prose poem, Eureka. But he also liked rowing and swimming: as a young lad, he was renowned among his friends for swimming six miles upriver in the Charles River in Virginia, and when he moved to New York City (for the second time) in 1844, one of his first acts was to row a skiff up the East River, all the way up past Roosevelt Island.

sidenote: I want to write a poem titled, “Edgar Allen Poe — Exercise Enthusiast”!

jan 17/RUN

2.2 miles
ywca track

Went to the y in the early evening, before community band rehearsal. Too crowded to swim, so I ran. Not as nice as running outside, but better than the treadmill. Listened to a playlist and forgot to count laps or notice the time. The track was crowded but not too crowded and not filled with oblivious people spread across the three lanes.

People I Encountered

  1. a woman who walked in the closest lane to the railing but often drifted over
  2. a guy, dressed in black shorts, a black shirt, and black running shoes, sprinting around the track then stopping to do battle ropes
  3. a tall guy with a blue shirt with the words “event staff” printed on it, watching over 2 young boys, shirtless, shoeless, and in sweat pants. Sometimes he held one of their hands as they carefully ran around the track. Sometimes he lifted them up at the far end so they could do pull-ups. As I left the track, I heard him say to one of the kids: you just ran a mile!
  4. 2 runners — a woman and a 10? year-old boy. Moving effortlessly around the track, their feet rhythmically rising and falling
  5. a guy in brown — not tan, but not dark either — shorts, running in a way that resembled speed walking
  6. an older woman in a white sweatshirt and dark pants, walking
  7. basketball practice below, in the gym — loud, exuberant players running up and down the court
  8. a man off in the corner doing burpees — his long torso and tall arms stretched high as he jumped up at the end of each one
  9. 2 men walking — the younger one looking out for the older one, making sure he didn’t veer out in front of any runner passing by
  10. a guy in a white shirt stretching before his run, doing leg swings

Other things I remember:

There was a white bucket for collecting drips set up in the middle lane on one side of the track. Scott peered into it and noticed that the bucket was dry. Why, he wondered, was it there?

Running the short end at the top, near the double doors, I saw a double shadow — 2 of me. At first I thought someone was about to pass me, but I was alone. Must have passed in front of the light just right. Strange and cool.

It was very dry on the track. My throat burned after a few laps.

As I turned the corners, I unintentionally tilted my head to the side. Corners are irritating.

At the far end, near where the man was doing the burpees and the kids were doing pull-ups, a banner was spread above the railing, blocking my view of the corner as I neared it. I imagined running straight into a group of walkers who might be hiding there

Did I think about anything? Did I look outside at the lights? I don’t think so.

After the run, Scott and I changed and met at the hot tub. The Otters swim team was having a practice. RJP’s and FWA’s old coach was still there, joking with the kids and calling out sets.

later: That night, I had a dream that I was swimming in a pool — the Y pool? Not sure — and a swim team coach — was it Whitney, FWA/RJP’s old coach? — said, Congratulations! You’ve made the team in the 100 free!


jan 16/RUN

4.5 miles
river road trail and edmund, north/seabury and river road path, south
35 degrees / steady rain
path conditions: a cold lake

Decided that I would go out for a run even though it was raining. It didn’t seem too slippery, so why not? I don’t regret the run, it was mostly fun and felt good, but the trail was almost completely lake, with a side strip of sheer ice. My shoes and socks were soaked after a mile. At first I didn’t care, but I started worrying (because as I get older, I do that more — sigh) that my toes/feet might go numb or worse. Nothing to do but just keep sludging through it. After I was done, my left ring toe seemed a little numb, but otherwise I was okay.

What a mess out there! The build-up of snow means there’s nowhere for the water to go. Lots of flooding in the streets and on the trail. Will this freeze overnight? I hope not.

In addition to soaking my socks and shoes, the water splashed up on my running tights. A gross grit. Because it was raining, my jacket was wet too.

It might sound like I didn’t like this run. Mostly, I did. My legs felt strong, so did my back. My arm swing was even and synced up with my feet. The rain helped me to not overheat. There was hardly anyone else out there. One other runner, 2 bikes — I noticed that at least one of them was a fat tire. Were there any walkers? I can’t remember.

I noticed the river! Almost completely open. Black, with one or two ice floes.

Anything else? Lots of cars. It was gloomy enough that most of them had their headlights on. Heard some splashing as they drove by, but never felt it.

I don’t remember hearing any birds or seeing any dogs. No skiers or sirens. No big groups of people.

As I’m writing this, I suddenly remembered that as I ran north on Edmund, down a hill, I could tell where the cracks and uneven parts of the pavement were by where the puddles were. Looking at this same road when it’s dry, I don’t think I would have been able to see. The puddles were very good pointer-outers. Look! Watch out! Here’s a bump, there’s a crack!

Wanted to find a puddle poem to add here. It took a while but I found “The Puddle” by Wisława Szymborska. As a kid, I never feared being swallowed up by a puddle. I imagine if I had any fears about puddles, it would have been that Jaws or a pirhana would have leaped out of the puddle to eat me. Okay, I don’t think I was actually afraid of that, but I could have been. Having watched Jaws and Piranha too much as a kid they were always appearing in my anxieties in the strangest ways.

The Puddle/ Wisława Szymborska 

Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

I remember well this childhood fear of mine. 
I’d step around puddles,
especially the fresh ones, just after it rained. 
For one of them might be bottomless,
even if it looked like all the rest.

One step and it would swallow me whole,
I would start ascending downward 
and even deeper down,
toward the reflected clouds 
and maybe even farther.

Then the puddle would dry, 
closing over me,
trapping me forever—but where—
and with a scream that cannot reach the surface.

Only later did I come to understand: 
not all misadventures
fit within the rules of nature 
and even if they wanted to, 
they could not happen.



jan 15/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees
clear roads / 50% snow-covered trails / puddles

Another warmer day. The sidewalks on my block and on the way to the river are still covered in ice and slick snow. Hopefully the warm temperature today will melt more of it?! A wonderful run. Ran on the road until edmund ended, then on the trail to the falls. I don’t remember hearing the falls at all. Maybe it was because I was distracted by trying to avoid people. Didn’t look at the river again today. Why do I keep forgetting? I felt good and strong and relaxed, although my right kneecap was shifting around again.

At some point, I decided that I — my brain and my feet — find it more interesting to run on a trail with a little bit of grit or snow or something more than just flat, hard asphalt.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. Near 42nd, right after I crossed over from edmund, I saw the blur of a runner moving fast down the Winchell Trail. I hope they had yaktrak on because I bet it was super slippery down there!
  2. crossing over at 42nd involved scaling a wall of slippery snow — the crosswalk on the side I choose was blocked with snow and ice
  3. Heard the scrape scrape scrape of a shovel on a driveway or a sidewalk — rough, loud. A stubborn stretch of ice?
  4. A cross-country skier skiing on the snowy boulevard between edmund and the river road
  5. Smelled smoke from a chimney, but not at the usual spot. The smoke I smelled today was farther south
  6. the falls were crowded! A big bunch (10-15) of people were spread across the sidewalk
  7. running above the giant sledding hill I heard a kid sledding down. I could tell the hill was bumpy because their yell, which they kept going the entire way, was jagged and cut in and out
  8. a runner in black tights and a white jacket stopped near the double bridge in the middle of the trail
  9. Passing a very tall runner in a blue jacket — me: good morning! them: morning
  10. my shadow beside me and ahead of me — dark, well-defined on this bright blue day

My favorite things about the run were spotting the cross-country skier and hearing the kid yell as they sped down the hill. That yell — so joyful and comical to hear it break up, bump after bump. I started thinking about how you can use your other senses to get to know a place. In this case, hearing helped me to notice that the path was bumpy and steep (the kid’s yell went on for a while). I think I’ll mention this in my class. It also reminded me of a walk I took with Scott one fall. We were walking on the Winchell Trail under a lot of trees. Without even looking we could tell when the trees still had their leaves because the air suddenly became cooler.

jan 14/RUN

4.75 miles
edmund, north/river road trail, north/seabury, south/river road trail, south
26 degrees
snow/ice-covered 75% (path) 25% (road)

For the first time since Monday, I was able to run outside. Hooray! What a difference it makes — for how the run feels, how I feel after the run — to run outside above the gorge. I ran on the road for part of it to avoid the worst stretches of the trail. Lots of loosely packed, slippery snow. I wasn’t as worried about falling as I was about having all my energy drained from the effort of running through the snow. Because of the bad conditions, I stopped to walk a few times.

Ran north to the Franklin bridge with no headphones. Turned around and put in a playlist.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. some of the roads were bare, others were still covered in soft, slippery snow
  2. a walker ahead of me on edmund was wearing a bright orange jacket
  3. running north, the wind was at my back. Returning south, in my face — cold and stubborn
  4. the river road was thick with cars, a steady stream
  5. a few bikers, more walkers, some runners
  6. a runner in a blue jacket, carefully making his way down the icy path near franklin
  7. an orange sign, a porta potty, a few barricades off to the side: there must have been a race earlier today
  8. a congress of crows cawing furiously, the sound echoing through the alley
  9. the scrape of a shovel on a sidewalk somewhere
  10. heading up from below the lake street bridge, hearing the wind shaking the dead leaves on the oak trees, sounding almost like water dripping — or was it water dripping?

Things I Forgot to Notice, or Didn’t Notice

  1. the river — don’t remember looking at it even once
  2. no regulars — no Dave the Daily Walker or Mr. Morning! or Daddy Long Legs or Mr. Holiday
  3. no geese
  4. no woodpeckers
  5. no black-capped chickadees
  6. no fat tires
  7. no kids laughing and sledding
  8. no overheard conversations
  9. no darting squirrels
  10. no music blasting from cars or smart phone speakers

Scrolling through twitter, I happened upon this poem:

Letter from the Catskills/ David Eye

Cousin–When a dozen robins blew into the yard yesterday–
I’d never seen so many–I watched them hop, cock their heads,
grab the thaw’s first worms. Such a pleasure, those yam-
colored breast feathers. Then snow las night, enough
for a fine white pelt, mostly gone by midday. (You’re better
off doing your play in the City, till it warms up for good.)
I wonder if the snow melted or–what’s that word?–
sublimed. To go from solid to gas, skipping liquid altogether.
The way I’d like to die. Grocery-shopping last night, I swear
I felt like such a loser. Not a fully set of teeth in the house,
yet I’m the freak: 45, alone at the Liberty Shop-Rite. And a snob:
can you believe it took four people to help me find capers?
So many breakups. My sister got the only keeper. God, I love
those kids. I dream of children almost every night. Awake,
I’m a eunuch. New vocal warmup, repeat before you go on
tonight: “unique New York eunuch unique New York
eunuch….” Give your boy a squeeze. The robins are back.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how poetry makes the familiar strange, but I think poetry can also make the strange familiar. Give us a door into the unfamiliar so we can get to know someone else and their experiences. The door in for me with this poem was all the robins. This past week, I saw so many fat robins on my crab apple tree, swaying and bobbing and getting drunk off the shriveled up apples.

a note about editing: I have a lot of typos in my writing. I didn’t used to. For years, that was a super power, being able to catch all the errors and to write a draft with hardly any mistakes. Now, I make lots of spelling errors (before I fixed it, I had spelled crab apple, CRAP apple), leave out articles and other secondary words, and for some reason, use an excessive amount of commas. I feel like I over-comma everything. Why? I think these errors and excessive commas are happening because I’m getting older, I’m writing more, the way spellcheck is set up with autocorrect is fucked up, and my declining vision. I think my declining vision is probably the biggest culprit. It’s frustrating and irritating and humbling to confront a decline like this, but I’m working on reframing it. Less of a decline, more of a shift to new practices and less worrying about stupid typos that don’t really matter. Maybe I’ll write a poem about it?


jan 13/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
run: 2.4 miles
basement
outside: an ice rink

Ugh. Hopefully it will warm up enough in the next few days so that the ice on the sidewalks will finally melt. I can run in snow and in the cold, but when the sidewalks and most of the road are one sheet of bumpy, uneven, super slick ice, I have to stay inside. Before I went down to the basement, I took Delia the dog for a walk for some recon. Almost fell at least twice on the short 2 block walk. Something interesting: even though it was very slippery and I almost fell, I never had that anxious, I’m-going-to-fall-feeling. No tensing up of my legs or shoulders.

Watched a comedian my sister told me about, Rhys Niccholson, on Netflix while I biked. I laughed a lot. Listened to the book, An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, while I ran. I loved An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good, so I was excited for another book, more time to spend with Maud. Thought I might run a 5k, but I felt ready to stop a bit sooner. All I remember from my run, other than listening to Maud pretend to be senile and feeble in order to not be found out as a murderer, was thinking that treadmill runs feel longer and are much less fun than outdoor runs. Oh — I also remember noticing my stride and trying to focus on the rise and fall of my feet and relaxing my shoulders as I swung my arms.

A few days ago, I bookmarked a wonderful essay by the Diné poet Jake Skeets: My Name is Beauty. I just started reading it and found so many wonderful passages, including this one:

Viola Cordova defines the concept of cultural relativity in her essay “Language as Window” as the way Western constructs constrict worldview to one single thing and dismiss differing worldviews. However, Cordova, through an analysis of the work of linguist Benjamin Whorf, states that language is the key to interpreting the world in different ways. Using an egg paradigm, Cordova asks us to imagine the Earth not as a physical rock in space but as the yolk of an egg. She asks us to imagine ourselves swimming through air rather than walking, and to consider ourselves within something, not on something.6 Seen this way, the Earth becomes a womb, a nest, an embrace.

The swimming through air reminded me of studying fungi this past April. Here’s something I wrote on April 21, 2022:

Thought about nets and this passage from The Mushroom at the End of the World:

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. Fungi are diverse and often flexible, and they live in many places, ranging from ocean currents to toenails. But many fungi live in the soil, where their thread-like filaments, called hyphae, spread into fans and tangle into cords through the dirt. If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae (137).

Thought about imagining the soil was liquid and transparent and then entering it, surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae. What if I could swim in the soil? Swim through these nets of fungal hyphae?

I must return to this essay later and work through it slowly. So many amazing ideas! In the meantime, here is one of Skeets’ poems:

Soft Thunder/ Jake Skeets

narrowmouth toads dapple pink sandstone
knee-deep in a brown bowl of brown water

before the croon of limb and wind on weeds
puddles from the pour gather for a morning song

the sun rises from a flatbed load of open palms
                : each crease a ripple a leg a half smile

the sun knows best when it rises
                : each tide and oak and uplift sung the same

each killdeer and mare and desert bighorn
each I I gorge each I I ravine each I I—

and each part of me is hung out to dry marooned

and wrung of rain, wrung of every I until no I is left
                        :      soft thunder
                                        ponds in a clearing

jan 12/SWIM

1.5 miles
ywca pool

Another swim this week! Noticed in the locker room that a few more people were wearing masks. Should I wear one? Before my swim, a strange sound: a woman walking into the shower area fully clothed, including sneakers that were clicking and clopping like she had yaktrax on. Did she? She went into a shower stall to find the stuff she’d left behind.

A nice swim. My googles leaked a few times, so did my nose plug. Did continuous 200s with my hypoxic breathing (3/4/5/6). Near the end, I turned it into 2 400s and changed my breathing every 100 instead of 50.

Three things I noticed:

1 — looking up at the flip turns

During one flip turn at the far wall, I looked up from underwater as I turned. In a flip turn, as you head into the wall you flip on your back underwater, then twist back on your stomach as you push off the wall (at least I do). I looked up while I was on my back, just before I pushed off. I noticed a yellowish-orangish glow. The lights from above water. It looked so cool that I made sure to look up several more times as I flipped. I couldn’t see anything but bright lights, which was a nice contrast to the pale blue of being underwater.

2 — gurgle, slosh, squeak

In a few of my recent log entries about pool swimming, I’ve mentioned that I didn’t hear anything but an occasional squeak from my nose plug. For a few laps today, I decided to listen. I heard some gurgling, a lot of sloshing as the water washed over my head, and a few squeaks from my nose plug. Nothing too exciting, but sound, always there. I guess I usually tune it out.

3 — crud on the pool floor

In addition to the usual specks of junk on the tiles, there was another chunk of white something on one tile, and some fuzzy brown things floating near the bottom of the lane next to me. Sometimes when I’m swimming, I think I see a thing floating off to the side. I check: it seems like nothing. Maybe it is nothing, or the trick of the light, and maybe it is something, some small bit of visual data sent to my brain that my eyes barely saw.

This week, I’ve been working on the class I’m teaching this winter about developing a practice of noticing and wonder and turning it into better words. Yesterday and today, I’ve focused on wonder as delight and curiosity. In the midst of this, my sister sent me a link to an article about the value of being in awe. Excellent. I enjoyed the article and I’m always excited when ideas about wonder, being open, and practicing awe are spread, and yet there’s something about the discussion that bothered me, something that seemed to be missing. Instead of dissecting the article and cutting down the things I didn’t like about it, which I used to do in my past life as an academic, I’d like to offer an expansion to one of the recommendations for how to learn to be in awe:

Practice mindfulness.

Distraction, Dr. Keltner said, is an enemy of awe. It impedes focus‌, which is essential for achieving awe‌.

“We cultivate awe through interest and curiosity,” Ms. Salzberg said. “And if we’re distracted too much, we’re not really paying attention.”

Mindfulness helps us focus‌ and lessens the power of distractions. “If you work on mindfulness, awe will come.” And ‌some studies show‌ that people who are meditating and praying also experience more awe.

“Awe has a lot of the same neurophysiology of deep contemplation,” Dr. Keltner said. “Meditating, reflecting, going on a pilgrimage.”

So spending time slowing down, breathing ‌deeply and reflecting — on top of their own benefits — have the added advantage of priming us for awe.

In this section, mindfulness seems to be loosely defined as focusing attention on something, being curious about it — the key here is IT. What you’re paying attention to is the object for you (the subject) and your focused gaze. What if this idea of paying attention (and being present to the world, which is another slogan for mindfulness) was reciprocal with the world? What if the world wasn’t the object, but subject or subjects? What if the value of being in awe was not only about confronting the vastness of the world beyond each of us as individuals, but about opening us up to experience how we are connected to/entangled with the world? I am pretty sure that what I’m trying to say doesn’t make sense to anyone else but me right now. That’s fine. Instead of spending the rest of the afternoon trying to make it intelligible (which is something else I would have done in my former academic life), I’ll offer up a poem that I found by searching, “mindfulness” on the Poetry Foundation site. I think this poem speaks to an expansion of what mindfulness could/can be as a creative, imaginative, reciprocal practice — a practice of not just focusing, but looking, seeing, beholding (see Ross Gay here). It’s that eye at the end — not only expanding what noticing is, but (I think, at least) speaking to the eye in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about the fish. See my jul 7, 2021 entry for more of a discussion of fish eyes and beholding.

Pot of Gold/ Ingrid Wendt

For Elizabeth Bishop, 1911–1979, with gratitude

We talk, you and  I, of  mindfulness, here in the world above
          water, but what’s below is watchfulness,
                     pure and simple: creatures trying not to be eaten,
          creatures relentlessly prowling or simply waiting for meals to
 
cruise on by. Except maybe parrotfish.
          Ever industrious, ever in motion, it’s hard to find one not
                     chomping on Yucatán limestone reefs. What we see as
          dead, bleached coral or crusted limestone shelves, for them

is re-embodied Fish Delight. Which means I find them by
          eavesdropping. Ah, those castanet choruses clicking, clacking,
                     a coven of  promises leading me on until there:
          below my mask and snorkel, a dozen or more upside-down

Princesses sway as one, in their pink and blue checkerboard
          gowns, their long, long dorsal crowns
                     cobalt-striped, and turquoise, and fuchsia—useless—
          no Prince to be found, not even in fish identification books,

just me and my ardor. Bewitched, each day I hang, transfixed,
          above them in a slightly different
                     place in that once-pristine, once-undiscovered Yal-Ku lagoon,
          its cradling mix of salt and fresh water

letting me hold myself, and time, and the rest of the world
          stock still. Sometimes I’m even luckier: out of the deepest
                     shadows (as out of my book) ventures
          the shy Midnight Parrot, a constellation of neon blue

mosaic scrawled on its head, its body—two feet long—
          as dark as blue can get and still
                     not be black, its parrot beak (that family
          trait) munching rocks and shitting sand. Puffs of it,

great big clouds of  it, murking the water until
          finally settling down
                     (it’s how, some scientists
          say, sandy floors of  tropical reefs are born).

But had I dared the slightest move, my Midnight
          would have, just like that, become Dawn.
                     And so it could have been, as well, with that one
          tremendous fish, secretive, off at the edge, among

the maze of  boulders piled on boulders, broken sandstone
          columns, deep channels between them, there—
                     in a shaft of  sun, the end of all my seeking
          and what I hadn’t known I’d sought—three feet long, at least

and all alone, clown-sized lips and eyelids the brightest possible aqua
          blue in an orange-gold face,
                     the way a child might rub its mother’s most dramatic
          eye shadow onto the most unlikely places:

forehead, cheeks, even the outermost edges of  every single
          emerald-green fin, even the edge of  the deep red tail, its tips
                     turned up at the corners—that tremendous fish was eating
          nothing, that fish wasn’t moving at all, except it turned its head

and one tremendous eye caught mine. And held it. Taut.
          Oh, I almost stopped
                     breathing. And the fish stopped
          everything, too, except for slowly pulsing gills—opening,

closing, opening, closing—in sync with my own
          pounding heart. Was I
                     the watcher or the watched? How long did we stay
          like that, hooked to one another, held in water’s palm,

as through my every cell, over and over, rang Rainbow, unstoppable
          Rainbow, until I had no beginning, I had no end,
                     Rainbow I was and happily would
          be still, had not a wayward cloud blundered in.

jan 11/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
run: 1.4 miles
basement
outside: 33 degrees / an ice rink

Outside it’s an ice rink and the air quality is bad. So, even though it’s warm, I biked and ran in the basement today. I took Delia out for a walk earlier to check on the conditions: solid ice everywhere. It’s so icy that the city suspended metro transit buses for a few hours. Yikes.

Watched an old triathlon race (2012, London Olympics, Men’s) while I biked, listened to the Apple Music’s “80s fitness” playlist while I ran. Not sure why, but “It’s Raining Man” had voiceover from Arnold Schwarsenegger talking about lifting weights. Huh? I skipped to the next song before I had a chance to find out why.

I don’t remember thinking about much as I moved. Basement workouts are usually only about moving and burning energy. I should try memorizing and reciting poems again.

Found this poem a few days ago. What a beautiful description. I love the bats and the black lake, and the swan and the moon.

I Went Out to Hear/ Leila Chatti

The sound of quiet. The sky 
indigo, steeping 
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before 
the air troubled above 
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly 
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.